Saturday, October 6, 2007

Here are some terms that you may find in this blog, but they may not be recognizable, since I made them up and they haven't caught on yet (not sure if they ever will, but that's a different story)

RAWsumer: Any non-interchangeable lens camera that supports a RAW format natively or via a firmware update. Firmware hacks do not count. These cameras have their own RAWsumer blog

"RAWZoomer": RAWZoomers are a subset of RAWsumers as defined above. A RAWzoomer is a superzoom fixed-lens digital camera that supports RAW natively. For this purpose, we define superzoom to mean a zoom ratio of 10X, regardless of focal length range.

"Analog memory card": Some people started calling memory cards "digital film". In protest, I am calling film an "analog memory card"

Fauxtokina: It refers to the time period new digital camera announcements are made during Photokina years, but for non-Photokina years. Notice the use of the french word "faux". Detailed explanation here. An alternate pronounciation is "June through October" :)

Prosumer Messiah: The term is an homage to Frank Herbert's Dune. It refers to the (anticipation and waiting for the) next big thing in the Prosumer segment, the one new prosumer camera that brings the prosumer segment back into the spotlight. Here is an example of a candidate.

nFF: Mythical near full frame sensors. For example, the speculated 1.1x sensor that may (or may not) be in a future Nikon D3-series camera. Original proposal

Blockbuster Camera: Inspired by the music industry perhaps, a camera model that has mass market appeal (in terms of sales and popularity) or manages to ship at least one million units during a year. An example of the former is the Panasonic TZ3 and of the latter are the Samsung S500 and S600 (of 2005). (This is a loosely defined term)

Floppica: A Sony Mavica FD-series camera that uses floppy disks for storage. So we go from Mavica to Floppica!

"Waiting for you so you can wait for them": Another way of describing a pre-order :)

Leak-troduction: The phenomenon where the leak of a highly anticipated camera happens just a few hours before the official introduction.

PhotoBlogoSphere: A sub-segment of the Blogosphere consisting of blogs that relate to photography.

PhotoForumSphere: Same as above, but it refers to forums instead of blogs/websites.

Pho Cred: The photographic equivalent of "street cred" :)

Rebrandos: Rebranded digital cameras!

PSAM: PASM is the traditional term used to describe cameras that feature Program Mode, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Manual mode. But PASM is just an ugly sounding term. It may even remind some of their "adventures" with MASM ;-) So we have decided to make it a more user-friendly term, PSAM, which is easier to remember too: P-SAM. Think Samantha Carter or Sammy or Quizno's Sammies or Uncle Sam, or just Sam.

Bijoutronics: Electronics that are look or are designed to be high-tech fashion accessories. For example, stylish colorful cutesy ultracompact digital cameras.

Derived Terms

Proposed derived term: LBA-(D)SLR: The term LBA has been coined by Pentax users to mean "Lens Buyers Addiction" (or Anonymous), the buying addiction and/or accumulation of lenses. So we take LBA and join it with (D)SLR and have LBA-DSLR. This creates a distinction between a fixed lens and an interchangeable lens DSLR. And it's easier to write "LBA-DSLR" than "interchangeable lens (D)SLR". Remember, the terminology confusion over the Olympus E10 and E20?

Embracing the computer-translated lingoThese are words and phrases created by computer-translated from Japanese to English text. We like them so much we have decided to embrace them! Here they are:

I only read the classic Dune book. I haven't yet read the others. A Dune movie would have some great photography in it since they are going to be going places to film all the scenes! Maybe they can take volunteer photographers :)